Big Red Tequila (Tres Navarre #1)(50)

Maia’s eyes glittered. She touched my jaw lightly with her fingertips. There was no pain, but I flinched. Slowly, her smile dissolved. She took her hand away. I wasn’t used to people being glad to see me. My look was probably harsher than it should’ve been. I was in pain. I was angry. I resented the way it felt to see her again. I didn’t like the way my eyes kept drifting down to the cut of her blouse against her  collarbone. Maia’s face closed up.

"After our talk I got concerned," she said. "I had some vacation time coming. It wasn’t a problem. When I couldn’t find you at your apartment—"

She nodded at my mother.

I looked at Mother, who folded her Guatemalan cloak over her arm and sighed.

"Tres, I just wish . . ." Mother let that statement hang, as if I should be able to complete it myself. "You remember Sergeant Andrews, of course."

I nodded, not really remembering which ex-boyfriend that was. Maybe Andrews was the one who had dated my mother for a few months after her divorce, before she had exploded into full Bohemian. As I recall, he’d shown up one night with roses and a couple of T-bones and found her burning patchouli incense over a spread of Tarot cards. He never came by much after that.

"Sergeant Andrews was good enough to call me."

Mother made it obvious that some people had not been.

"Ms. Lee insisted on helping. She suggested Mr. Ash."

Mother was resentful. Maia had interrupted a perfectly good maternal rescue operation and now Mother was obliged to stand apart from her, avoid eye contact, and do her best to look hurt. She crossed her arms and hugged her silver and Guatemalan prints tight.

If Maia noticed, she ignored it. She met my eyes again and tried to make her tone light as she spoke. "So," she said, "here I am."

All three of us feeling wonderful, we rode north on McAlister toward my mother’s dentist’s office while the rainstorm came through. After ten minutes my mother, never one for prolonged silences, tried to break the ice.

She put on a cassette of Buddhist chants.

"Chinese mysticism is so fascinating," she told Maia. "I’ve been studying it for years, off and on."

Maia had been staring out at the rolling live oak forests along the highway. She pulled her eyes away and smiled absently at my mother.

"I’ll have to take your word for it, " she said. "Is there a good place to get huevos rancheros on the way, Ms. McKinnis? I’m afraid I’m starving."

I could almost see my mother cringing closer to the driver’s side window. We listened to the windshield wipers for the rest of the drive.

I should have insisted on going home immediately, but I was tired, and it felt good, just for the moment, to be carried along, lying down in the backseat of my mother’s car for the first time in twenty years. I let myself be carried right into Dr. Long’s office. My dentist from elementary school, Dr. Long was older and grayer now, but his hands were just as big and clumsy inside my mouth as I remembered.

“Well," he said, "anything for a friend."

Then my mother smiled her warmest smile. Dr. Long smiled back and immediately cleared his afternoon appointments. Through a haze of anesthetics we had a great one-sided discussion about the advances in porcelain grafting technology. When he poured me out of the chair and into the waiting room, around five o’clock, he didn’t even offer me a lollipop.

The first word I said was: "Vandiver."

Mother looked overjoyed. At least until I walked into her house and started rifling through her knickknack displays for the Mexican statuette that Lillian had given me a week ago at the gallery. I finally found it on top of the piano, the two skeleton lovers in their hideously glazed orange car parked contentedly between a book of Zen poetry and a horseshoe. I repossessed the statuette, then walked out to Mother’s Volvo again.

I said: “Home."

It took my mother a few minutes to realize I meant Queen Anne Street. Then, looking pained, she asked Jess Makar to meet us there when he had liberated my impounded VW. Fifteen minutes later Mother dropped Maia and me off at Number 90, and was almost convinced she could leave us there safely when Jess drove up in my car. The .45 holes in the ragtop flapped wildly.

"Tres—" she said. She started to get out of the car for the third time.

I just shook my head and kissed her cheek. Jess nodded at me, gave Maia a long look, then climbed into the passenger seat.

"Tres—" she said again.

"Mother," I mumbled, "thank you. But go home now. It’s okay."

"And Lillian?"

I couldn’t meet her eyes. I couldn’t look at Maia either as we went up the steps.

After I had made sure that no one had been in the house, I stretched out on the futon. I stared at the water stain of Australia on the ceiling. Maia stood over me, hugging her arms.

"Byron Ash?" I said.

Maia shrugged very slightly. “He owed me a favor. His son and I were at Berkeley together."

"I don’t remember his name on that list of job possibilities you gave me."'

Maia managed a smile as she sat down next to me.

"Not that big a favor, Tex."

Eventually I slept, me and my hollow-eyed chauffeur driving a Thunderbird blindly into some dreams about men with little silver guns, Looney Tunes glasses full of bourbon, and pictures of authentic cowboys. I’m not sure, but I imagined Maia keeping watch over me all night. I think she kissed me once, very lightly, on the temple. Or maybe I just dreamed that too. At the time, I wasn’t sure which thought was more disturbing.